Single-player News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

It's more than fair to say that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been dividing opinions, and so we're very interested in hearing what you lot have to say about it. A far cry from the Batman-based, single-player shenanigans that put developer Rocksteady on the map, this co-op shooter has been a talking point for quite some time — especially since it was revealed to be a live service title months ahead of release.

A new report sheds some light on just how much EA invested in its single-player FPS Immortals of Aveum, which received mixed reviews and was deemed a financial flop.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has a bunch of easter eggs in Batman's Batcave that pay respect to Warner Bros. Montreal's Arkham Origins, providing more evidence that it's canon to the wider Arkham universe.

Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, the single-player JRPG, is dropping the Spring Festival on February 8th, 2024. It’s exclusively for players across South East Asia. And let me tell you, there are tons of goodies to snag in this Octopath Traveler: CotC Spring Festival!

For me the disappointment of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League isn’t just about its quality. It's about what it’s not as much as what it is. There’s very little of what made developer Rocksteady’s games so great in the past – near-unparalleled superhero power trips that sit alongside Insomniac’s critically acclaimed Spider-Man series. It’s also the latest in a frustratingly long line of beloved single-player-championing studios delving into unwelcoming loot-infested live-service waters. It’s been a perilous leap for many to make, with success limited to very few not called Bungie, and I hope we’re now at the end of this detrimental trend that’s plagued so many.

Helldivers 2 is a game designed with co-operative play squarely in mind, and yet there are those who want or have to play the game on their lonesome — and with them in mind, we have our Helldivers 2 solo guide and how to play in single-player explained.

Bandai Namco recently announced a new Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot DLC named 'Goku's Next Journey,' which will be available for players to check out very soon. 

We were so close to finally drifting on the cobblestone streets of Yharnam, but it looks like we’ll have to wait a little longer for Bloodborne Kart. And, it’ll be called something else when it does arrive. Lilith Walther, the developer behind the project, said the team has to “scrub the branding” off of the game and delay its release after Sony intervened. It was supposed to be released on January 31 for PC. The outcome isn’t exactly surprising, but it means the game will take shape a bit differently than planned — in a thread posted on X, Walther said, “This is a fan game no more!”

Bloodborne Kart, the long-awaited fan game that started as an April Fools' joke, is getting delayed to remove all reference to the FromSoftware action-RPG after Sony got in contact with the devs.

While the game may not look too different from past entries in the series, Tekken 8 comes with a lot of new features that can help you get better at the game. Alongside the enhanced Replay features, which provide players some tips on how to improve their gameplay, the latest entry in the series features Ghosts, fighters who recreate the fighting style of real players with the power of AI.

Splatoon 3 fans woke up to big news this morning. After initially being slated for Spring 2024, the second wave of the game’s DLC is getting a bump up. It’s now scheduled to be released toward the end of next month.

Nintendo has revealed exactly when most remaining online services for the 3DS and Wii U will come to an end. After 7AM ET on April 8, it will no longer be possible to jump into a multiplayer match on the original Splatoonor check out other players' levels in Super Mario Maker. Online co-op play, leaderboards and data distribution are among the features that won't be available on either console (unless you find an adequate homebrew solution). The Badge Arcade feature, which allows players to customize their Nintendo 3DS home menu, is going away too.

Palworld has had a pretty significant player base since its launch into Early Access on January 19, already hitting over 7 million purchases. But, alongside its ever-growing purchase figures, the concurrent players of Palworld is representative of just how popular this critter-collecting survival game has become. 

We’re not even a month through 2024 and it’s looking to be a rough year for the games industry. Massive developer and publisher Riot Games, home to League of Legends and Valorant, announced today it has laid off 530 employees or roughly 11% of its workforce. Legends of Runetterra, Riot’s competitor to Hearthstone, is also seeing a reduction in team size and will shift focus to its Path of Champions PvE game mode. Riot Forge, a division of Riot Games that focuses on teaming up with established developers and creating unique single-player experiences in the Runterra universe, will also be sunset.

Riot Games has announced that it will be laying off 530 employees globally, with departures mostly impacting teams outside of development. In addition, Riot Games has also announced that it will shut down Riot Forge following the release of Bandle Tale next month, the arm of the publisher that works with other developers to deliver smaller, more traditional single-player experiences such as The Mageseeker and Song of Nunu.

Palworld players have filed over 50,000 bug and error reports since launch, but the good news is that lost save data might be able to be restored.

Cyberpunk 2077's sequel, codenamed Orion, could have a multiplayer component. In a recent interview, CD Projekt Red CEO Michał Nowakowski confirmed that the studio is still "considering" multiplayer for the sequel, adding an element that never made it into the first game.

While Palworld has enjoyed an enormous launch, there are a number of serious bugs affecting players. Developer Pocketpair said it’s working on issuing fixes, including for players who are unable to enter servers, unable to play multiplayer, and a dreaded lost saved data bug.

Palworld has seen another huge spike in players today, making it the most-played game on Steam right now. For the title, it beats the usual game on the top spot, Counter-Strike 2, with a total of 1,157,485 players at the time of writing.

Rocksteady Studios founders Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker have established a new development studio in London called Hundred Star Games, which is described as a AAA games studio startup that will consist of “only 100 industry veterans and emerging talents.”

There aren’t many quality flight titles to choose from on the Nintendo Switch. But the console’s library will be adding one this summer as Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is officially inbound.

Black Kite Games has announced that Acolyte of the Altar will launch on PC via Steam on March 25, 2024.

Rocksteady Studios was known for delivering some fantastic single-player video game experiences. In particular, fans took notice of this studio with the line of Batman Arkham games. The franchise thrived for years and eventually came to an end in 2016. There were plenty of fans since wondering just where the studio would then focus in on. Rumors swirled the internet, with fans suggesting another DC Comics franchise would get picked up. A popular rumor that turned out to be false was that we would see the studio take on the challenge of delivering a Superman game. 

Every gamer should have a decent gaming headset — not the simple headphones that you can get for cheap. These devices will help you better appreciate the audio design of epic single-player adventures, as well as communicate more clearly with your teammates during online multiplayer matches for faster victories. Whether you want a budget-friendly option or a premium model, you should check out the gaming headset deals that we’ve rounded up here. Take advantage of any of these offers as soon as possible though, as we’re not sure if they’ll be around for long.

There is quite a bit of anticipation over what Naughty Dog is cooking. We were expecting The Last of Us Online for a few years, which was publicly unveiled a while back. But it was last month, leading into the holiday breaks, that Naughty Dog unveiled that this project was being killed off. So now the wait is just what exactly is being worked on next. Fortunately, we do know that an illustrator named Colin Lorimer from the talented PlayStation studio is working on this upcoming project. But don’t expect much more information to come out. 

Every Grand Theft Auto results in the player getting rich by unscrupulous means, but with Lester in GTA 5, we can now engage in white-collar crime, too — and we’ve got the Stock Market Assassinations missions from GTA explained to get rich quick.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has the same "DNA" as the Batman: Arkham games, says Rocksteady. This comes as many remain sceptical over the studio should working on a live service, since it previously found its success with single-player games.

The next game from Battlefield studio Ripple Effect, the studio previously known as DICE LA, is aiming to deliver the most realistic destruction effects in any video game.

2023 was a big year for gaming in general, but it seems it was a particularly strong year for PC Gaming in specific. According to a report from VG Insights, which uses data from Steam and other sources to estimate sales with a fairly high level of accuracy, the global PC gaming market grew to $9 billion in 2023, an 18 percent year-on-year increase over 2022. This followed several years of steady yet slower growth.

When the original Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl came out in 2021, it was a relatively bare-bones experience, but those bones were solid. Despite lacking many single-player modes, items, and even character voices, the core gameplay was good enough to keep the game afloat until it received refinements via online updates over the next two years. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, however, comes packaged with all those improvements and more. Developer Fair Play Labs has learned its lessons, and while the game isn't without its faults, it's a more-than-worthy follow-up.

Hilltop Studios has announced that its point-and-click narrative puzzle game Lil' Guardsman is coming to PC and consoles on January 23.

In a recent interview, Anna Guxens, senior RPG designer at Larian Studios, discussed the separation of each act in Baldur's Gate 3 and said that it's understandable if some players don't like Act 3.

CD Projekt has deemed Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty a commercial success after revealing it hit similar numbers to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty has performed just as well as The Witcher 3's DLC offerings despite being released years after the base game.

Is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League a live service game? It very much looks like it is, with elements such as a battle pass and gear scores. But developer Rocksteady seems at pains to avoid the now cursed phrase when talking about its game.

Cyberpunk 2077 came out on December 10, 2022, nearly three years ago. It was a mess at launch, so bad in fact that it was pulled from the PlayStation store amidst an influx of refund demands. CD Projekt Red got to work on updating the game to fix the myriad problems plaguing performance, while also working to introduce some of the key promises absent in the final game such as a working metro, ultimately delaying DLC plans.

The folks over at IGN have shared 18 minutes of new Dragon’s Dogma 2 gameplay footage, giving us a closer look at the game’s Fighter, Warrior, Sorcerer, and Thief vocations.

The action-adventure game A Plague Tale: Innocence is currently on a monster sale right now at the Epic Games Store, with it being completely free to download and play. 

Are you a wall-riding legend? Can you use Ice Wall to reach new heights? Does the kill feed light up when you use Self-Destruct or Dragonblade? Prove your skills with all new Hero Mastery courses! Lucio’s course launches today, and courses for Echo, Genji, Mei, and D.Va will be premiering each week for the next four weeks. You’ll also be able to earn new cosmetic rewards in a limited-time five-week event.

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Even though it's been a few weeks since Baldur's Gate 3 launched on Xbox Series X|S, some players are still facing an issue where saved data is being deleted once they sign out. The issue is being investigated by Microsoft but has yet to be resolved. Fortunately, Larian Studios has offered a workaround for anyone desperate to get stuck in which utilizes the studios' cross-save system. 

Just over a month away from its PS5 and PS4 release, Granblue Fantasy: Relink is getting new gameplay footage on the regular, and this latest chunk of combat from Famitsu is a treat. The 20-minute video focuses on several multiplayer boss fights (which are also playable solo with CPU allies). As we keep saying, the action RPG looks super promising, especially as full teams of four can coordinate their attacks to rack up huge combos and deal crazy damage.

Grand Theft Auto 5 or GTA 5 is Rockstar Games' open-world action-adventure and is the 7th main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series. Players can carry out a number of nefarious activities such as planning heists, robbing people, and stealing cars, alongside following the main storyline. Due to its massive scale, amazing mechanics, and variety of activities, GTA 5 has become the second best-selling video game of all time, with 175 million copies shipped. In the last few years, several major updates have been rolled out, but they have all focused on GTA Online, the multiplayer mode within GTA 5. However, the recent GTA 5 source code leak has revealed that Rockstar Games initially planned as many as 8 single-player DLCs for the game! However, they were all killed off!

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Starfield's recent Steam reviews are "mostly negative", falling even further from its already mixed reception post-launch. Between this and the online discourse surrounding the game, the latest Bethesda series proves to be divisive, having both dedicated defenders and vocal critics.

Eight single-player DLC expansions were planned for Grand Theft Auto 5, before being cancelled. This would have included a story centred around Trevor and another that would have seen players return to Liberty City.

Garena Free Fire MAX Redeem Codes for December 26: Ever wondered why online multiplayer games like Free Fire work on a global ranking system and not a level-based format like many campaign-based games? This is because, in a single-player game, progress mapping can be done by checking if the player has completed certain objectives in the game. However, that does not tell us how the player performed with respect to all the other players in the same stage of the game. And that is why the ranking system was invented. Since continuous progress in ranking is difficult due to incrementally increasing difficulty, games usually give out in-game items as a token of reward. And Free Fire uses these tools very well in order to keep a player engaged. And these redeem codes are part of that which lets players get some freebies to make them keep playing. Check the redeem codes below.

Happy holidays, or maybe it’s your birthday — or you simply decided to treat yourself to a brand-new Xbox Series X (or Series S). Now what? Sure, you could peruse Polygon’s list of the 22 best Xbox games, or the 25 best games on Xbox Game Pass. But you don’t have time for that! You’re probably reading this on your phone right now while your new Xbox whirs merrily away installing all of its fancy-new-console updates. The clock is ticking, and I’ve got you.

2023 was one of the best years ever for gaming, thanks to the release of several excellent titles across different genres, like role-playing and action-adventure. It was also a fantastic year for fighting games, thanks to the long-anticipated return of the two series that defined the genre back in the early 90s: Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.

Sony has been launching some of its best games on PC in the last couple of years, and 2023 saw the troubled PC release of TLOUP1.

Steam has rolled out a new Client Beta for users who have opted in to take part in it, which boasts a new version of the shopping cart when checking out. As specified in a blog post within the Steam News Events page, the shopping cart has received a handful of updates as part of this Client Beta. 

Final Fantasy XIV. I’m not going to even try to build suspense for our Best Ongoing Game winner. Destructoid has too many FFXIV sickos for anything else to take the crown, which is fitting given that our own Chris “Eorzea’s Finest” Carter was an early adopter of the now-legendary MMORPG.

Bethesda has discussed what’s coming to Fallout 76 in 2024, and confirmed the multiplier-focused post-apocalyptic role-playing game now has more than 17 million players.

Roblox Combat Warriors is a game where players get to fight each other to the death in an arena for around 30 minutes a round. This game can get incredibly intense, as it is very fast-paced and full of carnage.

Former Mass Effect lead writer Mac Walters has reflected on his time at BioWare and explained why he decided to leave the studio earlier this year. 

It’s 2023 and my miles-long PlayStation 2 backlog is still eyeballing me, but there sure were a lot of good games on PS5 this year worth jumping on — with a few of those available on PS4, too.

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While the single-player aspect of Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon was largely well-received, the game’s multiplayer component was a bit underfed at launch. Thankfully, that’s about to change, as the latest update for AC6 adds ranked online matchmaking, some new PvP maps, additional parts for upgrading and customizing your mech, and more. You can check out a quick trailer for the new update, below.

The fate of The Last of Us Online hung in the balance for a long while, with mixed signals being sent from Sony and Naughty Dog. It all started before the launch of The Last of Us Part II when it was announced that there would be no Factions multiplayer mode like in the original game.

Naughty Dog’s planned multiplayer game set in the world of The Last of Us is no more. The studio announced Thursday that it has “made the incredibly difficult decision to stop development on” what it’s been calling The Last of Us Online.

We were lucky enough to spend close to an entire day with Tekken 8 at a recent Bandai Namco press event — and we walked away from the experience thoroughly impressed. We've had high hopes for the long-running series' latest instalment for quite some time — especially since we're such big fans of Tekken 7 — but going hands-on with a near-final build of Tekken 8 really solidified our belief that this bone-crunching fighter could be something very special.

Tekken 8 will be getting a playable demo on PS5 this week, Bandai Namco has announced. Releasing at 8am GMT on the 14th December — a full week before it's available on Xbox and PC — the demo will include limited versions of Story Mode, Arcade Quest, offline Versus, and Gallery. Still, this sounds like a robust demo, and something that Tekken fans will definitely want to check out.

Naughty Dog has today shared the news its The Last of Us Multiplayer project has been officially cancelled. A post on the developer's official website states: «We’ve made the incredibly difficult decision to stop development on that game.»

Following The Last Of Us Online’s cancellation earlier this week, current and former developers from Naughty Dog have emerged to celebrate the mysterious multiplayer project.

Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian decided "from the get-go" that the mammoth RPG wouldn't be coming to Xbox or PC Game Pass, and that isn't going to change.

Atari and Mega Cat Studios have released Food Fight: Culinary Combat, a multi-player reimagining of the somewhat bizarre 1983 arcade game, into Early Access. The catch is that, right now, it’s exclusively available on the Atari VCS.

There was a ton of hype built up around The Last of Us Online. It was going to be a different kind of gameplay experience than what Naughty Dog is mainly known for. We’ve seen this studio turn out some incredibly detailed single-player experiences. But rather than adding a multiplayer component to The Last of Us Part II, a full-on multiplayer gameplay experience was being worked on. Unfortunately, as you all likely have heard, Naughty Dog has unveiled that production for this multiplayer title based on The Last of Us franchise has been killed off. 

A lead Starfield developer complains that gamers are "disconnected" from "the realities of game development". In the lengthy thread, Bethesda's design director Emil Pagliarulo argues that many critics don't understand how games are made, saying, "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is."

A screenshot from The Last of Us Factions 2, also referred to as The Last of Us Online, has leaked online just after its cancellation. If legitimate, this gives us our first, and perhaps only look, at this lost The Last of Us game, as Naughty Dog pivots back to working on single-player experiences.

The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog has confirmed that more than one single-player game is in development at the studio. 

The Last of Us multiplayer spin-off has effectively been canceled at Naughty Dog.

In an interview with World of Warcraft's player-led Community Council, game director Ion Hazzikostas weighed in on issues with the game's story and the steep narrative learning curve faced by newcomers. 

Naughty Dog has confirmed that it has stopped development on its multiplayer The Last of Us title — known as The Last of Us Online — after concerns that it would impact the studio’s future single-player games. 

Naughty Dog has cancelled The Last Of Us Online.

Naughty Dog’s hyped The Last of Us online multiplayer game, once said to be the most ambitious thing they’ve ever worked on, has been canceled. We’d heard for a while that the project was “on ice” following an unfavorable internal assessment by Bungie. That said, the game was never officially canceled. That’s now changed, with Naughty Dog providing a very clear reason for the change – they realized fully supporting a live service game would essentially mean becoming a live service studio, and they don’t want to do that.

Naughty Dog has announced it has ceased production of The Last of Us Online, its long-in-development multiplayer title set within its popular post-apocalyptic universe. 

The Last of Us won’t be returning to its multiplayer side after all. Naughty Dog confirmed today that it has stopped development on what it’s been calling The Last of Us Online, a multiplayer TLOU experience.

The Last of Us Online has been cancelled after more than three years in development. Naughty Dog made the announcement today, arguing that the ambitious project would require the studio to pivot entirely to post-launch support (read: a live service future) rather than their raison d'etre: big budget singleplayer narrative adventures.

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Naughty Dog has cancelled The Last of Us Online.